by Suzi Moore
My heart beat even faster and my legs felt as if they were being pulled down and down. It was like my arms couldn’t move, no matter how hard I tried. A hot, searing pain shot up and down my legs until I couldn’t kick any more. My body started to sink under the water. Panicking, I took one last gulp of air before my head went under. I saw the surface get further away and then everything went silent.
19
Zack
After those first few times on the beach, me and Alice became sort of friends, well, as much of a friend as you can be with someone that doesn’t actually talk. I don’t really mind. I’ve never been ‘almost friends’ with a girl before. The thing is, because she doesn’t talk, I find that I chat a lot. Like Mum does; it’s really weird. I think I’ve told Alice nearly everything about me, but she never looks like she’s bored or anything. And sometimes I notice she looks at me when I’ve said something as though she’s confused.
One day we were sitting on the beach with our toes in the water when I noticed a bruise on her leg and it made me think about how I’d kicked the policeman at the airport. And for some reason the whole story just came blurting out of me, but when I looked at Alice she wasn’t shocked or anything. She just looked like she hadn’t understood a word of what I’d said, so I repeated the whole story again and, when I did that, I felt weird. As I heard myself tell the story once more, I felt totally stupid. Why hadn’t I just told Mum why I didn’t want to go in an aeroplane ever again? Why had I waited till I got to the airport before having some total ‘kicking a policeman’ meltdown?
Alice tells me some things by writing in this notebook that she carries everywhere. Usually she hides it, but one day I had a look when she was having a swim. She’s really good at drawing actually. And her handwriting is way nicer than mine, but I think all girls’ handwriting is better than boys’. It’s like they’re just made to fiddle around with pens and biros like I’d seen Lexi and her friend Eddie doing for hours.
When I reached over to put the notebook back, a photograph fell out of the pages. I checked to see if Alice was looking and when I saw her duck under the water I took a closer look. I could see straight away that it had to be Alice’s mum. They were so alike. The exact same eyes and hair. I didn’t have a chance to look any more because I heard Alice splashing in the water as if she was getting out so I quickly put the photo and notebook away.
When I was walking back from the beach that day, I thought that if all the girls at Somerset Vale were like Alice it might not be so bad. I was just wondering how many girls there would be in my new class when I heard a familiar noise. A chugging sound that I knew so well. The noise got louder and louder and I turned to look up at the sky. At first the last of the sunlight was shining too brightly into my eyes to see it properly, but as it came closer and closer I saw it. A plane. A little blue plane. I thought of Dad once again and a smile came across my face as I followed it with my eyes.
When I got home, I was feeling strange. Not happy, not really sad, but as though someone had just given me a brand-new guitar and then told me I wasn’t allowed to play it. Mum was sitting in the living room, watching some rubbish soap.
‘Are you OK, sweetheart?’
I said nothing. I wasn’t in the mood for talking and besides it felt like I’d done nothing but talk all day. But Mum wouldn’t leave me alone. Where had I been? What had I been doing all afternoon? Had I eaten? Could I pick my clothes off my bedroom floor? When did I have a shower last? What did I want for dinner? Would I like a new bag for school? On and on she went. Question after question. It made me think of Alice and the fact that she could go for days without talking at all.
‘What would make someone not be able to talk?’ I said suddenly.
Mum eyed me suspiciously. ‘What makes you ask that?’
I shrugged my shoulders. ‘No reason,’ I said, trying to look like it was just an ordinary, everyday, Zack-type question, but my mum kept looking at me really strangely.
‘Is it because you’ve met Alice? The girl that lives up at Culver Manor. Apparently, she just stopped talking.’
‘No. I’ve not met anyone,’ I snapped. ‘I just wondered, that’s all.’
She looked right at me as if to say, ‘I so know when you’re lying.’ Then she walked out of the room and I could hear her rummaging through the cupboard under the stairs. She came back into the room with a large shoebox.
‘Here,’ she said, holding out a photograph she’d shown me before of her, Granddad and the other kids outside the cottage. I looked at the two older-looking boys and the girl, but then I spotted another face peeping out from behind my granddad that I hadn’t seen last time. There he was, a smaller skinny-looking boy with dimples and a mass of curly hair which seemed to spring up in every direction.
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘you showed me this already.’
‘Well, that’s David, Dr Richardson,’ she said, pointing at one of the older boys. ‘He’s Alice’s dad. We used to be friends.’
I looked at the photograph more closely. Alice’s dad was grinning and underneath his arm he held a football. Alice definitely didn’t look like her dad, but the other taller boy and the girl in the photograph looked just like him.
‘Who’s that then?’ I asked, pointing at the taller of the two boys.
Mum looked sad when she answered. ‘That’s Tom. David’s older brother. They were always hanging out down at the harbour when we were young. And that,’ she said, pointing at the other girl, ‘is Aggy, David’s little sister.’
‘And him?’ I asked, pointing at the curly-haired boy.
Mum suddenly looked really sad. She held the photograph up to the light and sighed. ‘He was my favourite. The sweetest, kindest boy I ever knew.’ She sort of gazed off into a bit of a daydream and I thought that she was going to cry. I waited for her to tell me more, but she started searching through the box until she pulled out a much larger photograph that I hadn’t seen before.
‘Culver Manor,’ she said, holding it out to me, and I saw a house that looked almost as big as my old school. The front of it was covered in some kind of plant thing that made the house look green. The windows were boarded up and the whole place made me think that it was somewhere I wouldn’t want to live in at all. Poor Alice, I thought, she lives in a well creepy house.
‘I don’t know what it looks like these days, but the last time I went there it looked like this.’ Mum stopped to think for a bit and then she shook her head slowly and said, ‘That house was filled with sadness; that family had such bad luck.’
‘What bad luck?’ Suddenly I was really interested in the spooky house that Alice lived in. ‘Tell me! What happened?’ But Mum put the photograph back in the box and stood up.
‘Oh, another time, Zack. I’m not in the mood for telling sad tales after all. What do you want for your dinner?’
I watched her disappear into the kitchen and for a minute I was going to ask again, but then one of those stupid ‘Back to school’ adverts came on and I thought about the new school again. A feeling of dread started to crawl over me. I imagined the classroom filled with kids that all knew each other. I saw myself walking into the canteen and dropping my plate. I imagined everyone laughing at me and when Mum brought us a bowl of pasta each I didn’t feel much like eating mine.
‘Zack, if you do happen to meet Alice, you will be nice, won’t you?’
I ignored her and carried on pushing a piece of pasta round the bowl. I could feel her looking at me and when she saw my miserable face and the half-eaten pasta she said that if I wanted to I could run over to the shop and get some chocolate.
‘Don’t run through the churchyard!’ she shouted after me as I raced over the little bridge.
That night, when I was just about to turn my light out, Mum knocked at the door and peered inside. I looked at the floor that was covered in clothes, a plate from three days ago, a heap of wet towels and several empty crisp packets.
‘Come on, Zack. I asked you to clear this mess up
two days ago.’ She walked in, almost tripped over a pair of shoes and sighed. ‘Look, you’re going to have to be a bit more grown-up about stuff like this. How would you like it if I left the house in a tip?’
Why couldn’t she just leave me alone?
‘I couldn’t care less, Mum, I really couldn’t.’ And with that I turned and lay back on the bed and opened a magazine to tell her the conversation was now over.
She stood over me for ages, tapping her foot like eleventy million times.
‘Your dad would be so sad to hear you talk to me like this.’
‘Well, he isn’t here, is he?’ I said angrily. ‘And now we’re stuck here, aren’t we?’
She didn’t say anything after that so I just carried on looking at my magazine, hoping she’d leave me alone.
‘Zack,’ she said seriously, ‘I know this is really difficult. If I was you, I’d be cross with me too. But listen, if you carry on with that attitude, you’re going to be really unhappy. If you talk to other people like that, you’re going to get in trouble. If you kick off every time I ask you to help me, we’re both going to be miserable and, more importantly, if you go to your new school with this rubbish “poor old me” attitude, you won’t have any friends.’
I put down my magazine and glared at her. ‘Have you finished?’
She looked down at me with a sort of surprised, shocked face.
‘OK, fine, be like that, but do me a favour, will you? Try and stay out of trouble when I go to work on Tuesday. Please? Just . . . I don’t know, be cool, would you?’
Like Mum knew what that meant.
Mum and her ever-changing hair colour which was like: THE OPPOSITE OF COOL.
20
Zack
Yesterday Mum went to work and I got to stay in the house all by myself. Well, almost all by myself because Mum had arranged for this woman she’s known for years to keep checking up on me. She said that she wasn’t sure it was such a good idea to let me hang around all day by myself. ‘Who knows what you’ll get up to?’ she’d said when I asked her why.
‘This is Pippa,’ she said to me on Tuesday morning. Pippa wore the sort of clothes that a man would wear: a pair of dark blue shorts with lots of pockets, a sort of big black belt that had a purse at the front and a pair of heavy-looking sandals that showed all her toes were kind of muddled up and sticking out. I didn’t like the look of her at all so I stared at her with my ‘I don’t like you already’ face. And she peered over her glasses at me in a ‘you look like trouble’ kind of way. She chatted to Mum for a while so I went upstairs to clean my teeth. I was just thinking about when I could sneak out and down to the beach when Mum came barging into the bathroom.
‘Leapfrogging over gravestones is NOT ON at all, Zack!’
Oh, I thought, remembering the short cut I’d taken through the churchyard the other night. Oops. Then she went off on one about how it was a really disrespectful thing to do and that Granddad was buried there and how unkindly I was behaving. She said how lucky we were to live here and how I needed to make an effort.
‘“Centre of the universe,” my dad used to say! And you know what, Zack? Being here again makes me realise that this is a much better place for you to grow up. It’s safer. People look out for each other. People care about each other.’ I heard a tremble in her voice and I felt bad.
When Mum left for work, Pippa sort of hung around for a bit, asking lots of stupid questions. I looked up at her from the sofa and sort of grunted back at her.
‘Hmm,’ she said, peering over her glasses. ‘My grandson is about your age. He’s football mad. I bet you’re like that too?’
I thought of Lou and the hours of football we’d played together in our old garden. It made me think of Dad and his ability to save just about any goal we tried. I’m not very good really.
‘My dad played for his school and stuff, but I’m not . . .’ I drifted off, but Pippa just smiled down at me kindly.
‘Well, my husband says I’m a pretty bad cook, but I’ve not poisoned anyone yet. I left a casserole in the oven last year and forgot all about it. Came back from the beach and the thing was a lump of black bones in the bottom of the pan. Stunk the whole house out for weeks. Even the dog seemed to turn his nose up, as if to say, “Good gracious, Pippa, when are you going to learn to cook properly?”’
It made me laugh, sort of, then she ruffled the top of my hair and left, saying she’d be back at lunchtime. I watched her waddle across the little bridge and that’s when I realised that I quite liked being left in the house by myself. At our old house, in our old life, my mum had to come everywhere with me and I was never, ever allowed to just stay home alone. Back then I didn’t mind, I didn’t really like sitting on my own, but now I loved having the little cottage all to myself where I could stay in my pyjamas, watch TV and eat cereal out of the box without anyone telling me what to do.
The next morning I ate three bowls of cereal, two slices of toast and by the time Pippa came over to check on me I’d already eaten my lunch and the last bag of crisps so there was nothing left to take to the beach at all. I watched her cross the bridge again and as soon as she was out of sight I headed out once more.
The thing about Alice is she brings the best picnics to the beach. She always has much nicer sandwiches and cakes and biscuits than me, and most of the time she lets me have some of hers too. We must have been there for about an hour or so when I watched Alice wander off down the beach and at that exact moment I felt my tummy rumble. I was so hungry that it actually hurt a bit. Do you ever get that? Anyway, I know I shouldn’t have done it, but the lovely foodie smells that were coming out of Barbie world were too nice to ignore and, before I knew what I was doing, I’d stuffed nearly all of Alice’s Jaffa cakes in my greedy mouth. I was just finishing the last one when I spied her notebook. It was opened at a page, and I saw she’d written my name, so I bent down and picked up the book. At the top of the page she’d written: Things I like about Zack, and then there was a sort of list. It kind of made me smile a bit. But, when I got to the bit where she’d written He has really nice eyes, it made me laugh out loud and boy, was she unhappy about it.
At first I thought she was going to kick sand in my face or something. I thought she’d really shout at me; instead she grabbed the notebook out of my hand and smacked me over the head with it. I’m not kidding. And it wasn’t some little girly smack either: it was a proper whack and it totally hurt. I thought she was completely mental. I mean, I was only teasing, but she, like, lost the plot. Then she started crying and it made me get angry. You don’t catch me crying every five minutes and I just blurted out a load of stuff to her that I knew I shouldn’t have.
She did that typical girly, pouty, sulky thing and went off in a huff. She sat at the other end of the beach for ages and after a while I felt really bad. I called out to say I was sorry, but she just put her hands over her ears like some kind of baby. I was going to go over to her and say sorry again, I really was, but I realised that the tide was starting to come in and I’d have to leave before it got too dangerous.
I really didn’t ever want to do that scary swim again.
I wandered back slowly. I felt the sunburn on my nose and started to pick the skin off from around the edges. I had just reached the other side of the headland when I heard the chugging sound again. It got louder and louder, and when I looked up towards the other side of the bay I could just see the little blue plane soaring high above the hill. It flew higher and higher, and I watched it get further and further out to sea until it became a smudge and disappeared. I stood like that for a while, kind of hoping it would come back, but it didn’t.
My legs felt tired so I sat down on one of the larger flat stones, stared out to sea and thought about Dad. How do you get to be brave like he was? Is it something I’d learn like cricket or tennis? Is it something that would just happen? Like the time my school shoes were too small and Mum had said, ‘My goodness, Zack, your feet must have grown overnight.’
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br /> I looked back towards the headland. I watched the waves as they crashed on to the stony beach, but then I saw something else. At first I thought it was just seagulls diving into the sea, then I thought it was the seal again, and finally I realised it was none of those things. The shape that was splashing around in the water was Alice. What was she doing? Why was she swimming so far out? Then I saw with horror that she WAS NOT SWIMMING. Alice was drowning! I saw her head dip under the water and pop up again. She waved her arms around in the air and all the time she was getting further and further away. She was being dragged out to sea! If I didn’t do something, she was going to be pulled all the way to the other side of the bay where she’d be smashed against the rocks.
Without thinking, I ran over to the lifeguard’s hut, grabbed the lifebuoy off the side of the wall and ran as fast as I’ve ever run in my whole life. Slinging the cord of the life-buoy round my waist, I dived into the sea and swam so fast it was as though there was a great white shark chasing me.
One, two, three, four, breathe.
One, two, three, four, breathe.
The further out I swam, the colder and rougher the water became. I felt the seawater burn as it went up my nose, but I didn’t care. I kicked and kicked my legs until they ached so much that I thought I’d never make it. As I got nearer, I felt my legs being pulled and realised that it was the undercurrent that Mum warned me all about, but I was going to beat it. I saw Alice’s head dip under the water and for a second I thought I wouldn’t make it. For a moment I thought she was gone for good, but my hands reached out just in time to feel her tiny wrist. I grabbed it tightly and quickly pulled her towards me, looping the lifebuoy round us.
